Facebook executive: advertisers need to control consumer data - The Guardian

Mark D'Arcy, Facebook's global creative director, has warned advertisers that they need to control consumer data gleaned from TV and internet campaigns, or they are wasting the billions of dollars spent on marketing every year.

D'Arcy said that the advertisers needed to take a leaf from the wider creative industries – such as musicians, authors and filmmakers – and protect and analyse the increasing amount of consumer data extracted from campaigns.

"One of the biggest disconnects in the industry is the world of media and insight of media and data from the creative process," he said, speaking at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity on Tuesday. "If you really care about your idea desperately, and you desperately want to share it with the world, you better be deeply embedded with the distribution methods on any platform. On TV or anything else where that story is going to be amplified and told in the world. Creative people have always cared about that."

Facebook's chief engineer Andrew Bosworth, responsible for Facebook innovations such as news feed, messenger and groups, was scathing about the relevance of the bulk of the 35,000-plus creative advertising campaigns launched globally each year, arguing that they are failing to embrace the digital medium, and still target the myth of a "captive" audience.

"The captive audience is on its way out," sad Bosworth,. "It is dying slowly and steadily – and we all know it. We know when we are watching TV we are all using a second screen. We know that print is declining in circulation in certain areas. And people are going to have a lot more choice with what they do with every minute of their time."

He said that it "worried" him how few of the campaigns he had been checking out submitted for Cannes Lions awards that had resonated with him, arguing that no one cares about small scale marketing.

"I thought maybe I wasn't connected to the right sources, maybe I wasn't paying attention or plugged in," he said. "It turns out a lot of these [campaigns] hadn't been seen by that many people. For Facebook, the same is true for almost any company in [Silicon] Valley, in New York, London, in Europe – if you are talking about a campaign that reaches 10,000 people, who cares?"

D'Arcy chimed in: "That's [the scale of] a small local newspaper. How do we [the ad industry] stop advertising at people, what can we do to make people connect with us?"

Dave Droga, founder of ad agency Droga5 and the most awarded creative executive in Cannes history, largely agreed.

"For so long we have been able to exploit a captive audience and we got lazy," he said. "For the first 15 years of my career I just thought about creativity [not effectiveness of campaigns]. We're an industry that likes to talk at people. We are competing against some guy putting a cat down his pants on YouTube, but the best stuff bubbles up."